Coen Bros: No Country For Old Men part 3

A suitcase full of money, no matter what the amount, is always a symbol of transformation in American movies, a chance to start your life over again, escape the bonds of your class, your birth, your family, your job, whatever is keeping you down. Traditionally, in the course of American movies featuring suitcases full of money, the expected transformation does not happen — instead, a world of pain is visited upon the receiver until they finally have to give up the money or lose it or give it to charity. A suitcase full of money is a shortcut, a way around the forces of the American system, where People With Money have all the power and People Without Money have none. An appreciable amount of money falling into the hands of People Without Money upsets the system and the system, in one way or another, always retaliates. In America, the movies keep telling you that Money Cannot Buy You Happiness, while the rest of the culture tells you every minute of every day that Money Can Buy You Happiness Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. The system asserts its prerogative: there are no short cuts to improving your life (“There are no clean getaways” is how No Country‘s poster puts it), only hard work and, occasionally, dumb luck. Just look at the Coens’ other movies — whether it’s gangsters, car salesmen or trailer trash families, their movies are full of poor saps struggling to overcome their circumstances, and resorting to crime to do so — and ultimately failing to accomplish anything.

(When Moss finds the case in the novel, he looks inside and author Cormac McCarthy notes: “His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down to forty pounds of paper in a satchel.” I’m tellin’ ya, the guy can write.)

So Chigurh, we could say, is all about the money. It cannot be a coincidence that, in addition to killing anyone who impedes his progress toward the suitcase full of money, he decides innocents’ fates with the flip of a quarter and uses a dime to unscrew the vent covers where Moss has hidden the case.

(Incidentally, here is another argument for Chigurh being in the room with Bell when Bell shows up to look for him — Bell looks down and sees the vent cover sitting on the floor with the screws and a dime sitting next to it. It seems Bell interrupted Chigurh at the precise moment of his retrieval of the case — otherwise why would the otherwise lack-of-evidence mad Chigurh leave a trace of his being there?)

(And let me add here one more layer of coolness to “that one scene:” Sheriff Bell enters the room and stands in the doorway, and he sees his shadow on the opposite wall, turned into two shadows by the headlights of his cruiser. I think that Chigurh is that “second shadow,” one of a number of visual cues [the both of them gazing into the blank TV set in Moss’s trailer is another] meant to connect Bell and Chigurh visually. If Chigurh is Bell’s second shadow, then perhaps that is how he can be in the same room with him but undetected. Or, more interestingly, what if, Donald Kaufman-like, Chigurh and Bell are the same guy? Maybe that’s what

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  meant by the scene being “Lynchian.”)

(However, the screenplay, for what it’s worth, seems to state pretty clearly that Chigurh is in the room when Bell gets there, hiding behind the door, then scrambles to hide somewhere when Bell enters, then goes out the door when Bell is in the bathroom. Just saying.)

ABOUT THAT QUARTER: Is Cormac McCarthy aware that Chigurh is imitating Batman villain Two-Face in deciding innocents’ fates with the flip of a coin? If even my wife, a non-comics-reader, refers to the habit as “Chigurh’s Two-Face Routine,” how could he not?

(Gasp! Two-Face was played in Batman Forever by — omigod! Tommy Lee Jones! And while I’m here, I should remind the reader that the Coens were offered the job of making the 1989 Batman before Tim Burton landed the job. Wheels within wheels!)

The great thing about how the Coens have written the character and how Javier Bardem plays him is that he manages to be both weirdly unplaceable and recognizably human. Take the scene where he walks into the gas station and does his Two-Face Routine with the attendant: he threatens the man’s life with his menacing tone, then suggests that the poor guy’s life, which he doesn’t seem to have given a moment’s thought, is a series of choices that have irrevocably led him to this moment in time, where his fate will be decided by the flip of a coin. When the man wins the coin toss, Chigurh warns him not to put the coin in his pocket, because it’s a special coin, the coin that marked a change in his life. Then, just before he leaves, he gives the man a half-smile and says that it’s an ordinary coin after all. This last line achieves two things. First, it suggests that Chigurh never intended to kill the guy and was just messin’ with him, then it suggests that any ordinary object can be the tool that decides your fate.

(He goes on quite a bit more in the book: “Dont put it in your pocket. You wont know which one it is,” he says, then adds: “Anything canbe an instrument. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say, it’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?”)

(Chigurh seems disgusted with people in general, but he saves an unusual level of contempt for the gas station guy, perhaps for not paying attention to his life enough. In the book he goes so far as to call him a “cracker,” a word I have a hard time imagining coming from the Chigurh as played by Javier Bardem. What riles him so about the attendant? I think it’s that he married into his job — just like both Ed Crane and Big Dave did in The Man Who Wasn’t There — and is therefore less than a man. He didn’t seek out his fate, he just kind of let it happen to him without thinking about it.)

Now then: Chigurh in the book ends up in a totally different place. He kills everyone in his way to get the money, and then he returns it to its rightful owner, much to the owner’s bafflement, as the owner did not hire Chigurh and has no idea how he found him. Chigurh in the book wants to set things right, to return the life-changing suitcase full of money to its rightful owner (that is, Capital) and preserve what he sees as his natural function, quite literally a capitalist tool. A well-paid tool, but a tool nonetheless. Perhaps Chigurh understands, like Mose the Magic Clock-keeper in Hudsucker, that capitalism is the thing that keeps this old Earth a-turnin’, and by keeping the money for himself he would be upsetting the gears of that unstoppable machine. Chigurh is not swayed by the promise of the suitcase full of money — he “knows his place” and, ultimately, is a “good boy” who restores economic equilibrium to his world.

Chigurh, in the movie, is a man (a deeply insane man, but still a man) who embodies a more savage and cutthroat image of capitalism. The Man Who Hires Wells refers to him as a “loose cannon,” that character most reviled by The System, the lowly tool who Goes Into Business For Himself. In the movie he has what we screenwriters call a Bright Idea: he’s going to kill everybody and run off with the money. He’s a “maverick,” he’s going to rip everybody off and live happily ever after, chuckling to himself about how much smarter he is than everyone.

But, as Mamet would put it, There Was One Thing He Forgot. Chigurh does his Two-Face Routine with the attendant and with Carla Jean, Moss’s wife, emphasizing the effect of chance on the lives of innocents. The attendant, one of the working stiff sheep that wander through Coen movies without a clue, obeys Chigurh’s commands, but Carla Jean calls him on his bullshit. Chigurh says the coin, chance, will decide his victims’ fate, but Carla Jean recognizes that even the decision to leave someone’s life up to the toss of a coin is still a decision — in a heartbreaking act of bravery, she refuses to play his game — and it is a game. Chigurh likes to think of himself as a god, but he’s something sadder and more pathetic — he’s a man who likes to go around pretending he’s a god. So Carla Jean refuses to play his game and Chigurh kills her anyway, and then goes outside and gets creamed by a station-wagon in a totally random accident. The man who teases others with his pretensions to chance gets laid low by the genuine article. Of course, he walks away from his random accident (his money buys the silence of the boys who see him) but that’s another story. As far as the movie is concerned, Chigurh may have beaten The System, but the Universe has other ideas.

(This all plays out slightly differently in the novel. Carla Jean protests his Two-Face Routine, but ultimately calls the coin-toss — and loses. Chigurh is then hit not by an anonymous station-wagon but a carload of drug-addled teenagers. The book seems to want to say that Chigurh is hit by the ultimate product of his trade [drug-addled teenagers], but the movie turns the accident into a Message From God. Both work on different levels, and the movie does an excellent job of taking the plot-points of the novel and, through canny compression and subtle changes, turning those plot-points into the soul of the book, the spirit between the lines, and is reason enough to call No Country one of the great adaptations of all time.)

NEXT, I will gas about generally cool stuff in the movie